It is well known that in a swimming pool, it is necessary to keep water “clean” by maintaining a good water circulation level and using the correct levels of additives, i.e., feed or chemical products (e.g., chlorine, muriatic acid, or similar). The needed water flow and chemical quantity depend on various factors, but one of the most important that can vary easily is the number of persons inside the swimming pool (especially in large swimming pools or public swimming pools). There are systems that can measure the level of chemistry inside the water, such as indicating when more products are required if the level is not ideal, but the consumption of these products depends also on the water flow circulating inside the pool. The circulation is created by a specific pump system controlled by a dedicated device. In the simplest cases, the device is a timer, and for bigger pools and public pools, it could be a programmable logic controller (“PLC”).
Normally, the circulation is set without considering the number of persons that are inside the pool. The circulation can be set by systems that switch on and off pumps within a specific period of time, for example, “n” minutes on and “m” minutes off (where “n” and “m” are variable numbers). This configuration could work in private small swimming pools, where the variation of the crowd level is not as important. Moreover, these pools cannot accommodate more than a few people and normally are not used extensively. In bigger pools, especially in public pools, the conditions are different. During the day, the crowd level of the pool can vary significantly. Because the most important requirement is to keep the water clean, in the previous and common configurations, the pumps would run even when nobody is inside the pool; resulting in a waste of energy (over use of the pumps) and additives (due to unnecessary water flow).
There are other systems that can control the number of people accessing the pool area, for example, by using turnstiles and toll gates at the entrance of the building. In these cases, the pumps' speed and the chemistry are regulated by a PLC basing on that number. Even if this is a “greener” configuration as compared to the first one, these systems cannot know how many people are actually inside the pool. For instance, many of them could be in the building or in the area around the pool but not inside the water, e.g., in a water park or similar locations. This limitation can be a source of wasted energy and additives.
The purpose of the system described herein is for monitoring the status of a swimming pool and understanding the level of crowding inside the swimming pool. The system may transmit data to the circulation control system of the swimming pool to regulate, for example, the pump speed and the additive concentration based on effective need.